PUBLISHED WORK
Fall 2018
You are Mary and I am Laura
and Jack is our pet tornado
churning across the berm.
He twists up grass
and a murmuration of starlings.
He twists up a swarm of locusts.
We loop dirty fingers
and walk to the tracks...
October 2018
The morning smells like freshly-baked bread / and low-tide sea creatures. Someone whistles / for their dog. Someone asks for their coffee to go. / Someone picks out a Sam Cooke song on the guitar. / We listen to tourists’ footsteps on the boardwalk above / and cup our terrible song in fingers stained with seaweed / and nicotine... read the rest at Sweet Tree Review
October 2018
You are Mary and I am Laura / and Jack is our pet tornado / churning across the berm. / He twists up grass and a / murmuration of starlings. / He twists up a swarm of locusts.... read the rest at Menacing Hedge
July 2018
88% is a lot, nearly the whole / thing. The black moon sliding / over the sun like a manhole / cover, a heavy mineral disc left / ajar. But shadow-chasers say / totality makes all the difference....read the rest at Pittsburgh Poetry Review
DIDO BAKES A PIE
Today, I gathered
the strawberries that
grew wild after you
left. Snipped the runners
running from their beds,
flicked baby slugs from
the underbellies
of serrated leaves,
deposed red berries
from their sprouted crowns....
DEMETER SCRUBS THE BATHTUB
When winter gives way to wet,
our breath more water than air,
you think of flowers:
snowdrops and cherry blossoms,
lilacs pearled in purple-beaded bundles,
erroneous crocuses....
He’s the original Adam, cable-knit sweater pulled down
over his missing rib. He’s thinking about ending things
with Eve—not because he doesn’t love her, I mean God,
look at their history—but because he can’t remember...
HERA TAKES DOWN THE CHRISTMAS TREE
I begin with the smallest ornaments, start at the top
and work my way down, lift the fine filament hooks
from every browning branch. The tree’s fragrance rises
at each violation, its pine scent strong and tangible.
It stretches like an animal above my head....
Fall 2018
In this version, she’s still not easy to love. In this version,
she stalks your pets, not your children. Her indifference
cuts you. Her unflinching yellow eyes. She’s no
shoeshine deer, no lapsed sheep. In this version, she ignores
Little Red Riding Hood, her talcumed grandmother.
She brings bones to the den, licks her cubs’ noses wet,
cradles her lover in the furred scoop of her body....
September 2020
Clouded sky, a huckleberry moon
hidden up there somewhere. It’s night
nearly all day. I think about you
and your pocketful of paper matches
gone damp in the rain. The convocation
of flares we left behind. My pocketful
of cigarette butts, my pocketful of ash.
How many hearts broken between us
and pasted back together with the sticky
remains of rum and chewing gum.
Winter 2019
The northern white rhino will be extinct. My oldest daughter will get braces. I will go on a date with a social worker. I will throw away 540 sandwich bags. I will throw away a beat-up Barbie dollhouse too trashed to be donated. I will throw away forty-seven toothpaste caps, white-ridged floating bits seabirds mistake for food, scoop up in their beaks, and feed to their babies until their bellies are so full of plastic they can’t hold anything else. My baby will get her period, will get hair under her arms, will reluctantly allow me to buy her a bra. I will tell her to wear it only if she wants to. I will read a lot and write a little. I will gain a dog and lose a cat. The world will gain a dictator or five and lose Lister’s gecko, the blue-tailed skink, the Cryptic Treehunter, Spix’s Macaw, and the Kihansi spray toad. I will say I’m going to stop drinking eighty-nine times. I will not stop drinking...
December 2019
You find the cracks for me—the small space
behind the triangle of peeling wallpaper,
the crevice in the plaster, the air between
one page and the next. O Lady, show me
the hidden. Silver splash stacked among
the good china. The shine between piano
keys, bathroom towels, floor boards, grout.
Powder through the holes in my curtains...
Summer 2019
Here they are, thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion
zone. A hardy gold-coated thing of extremes,
of grassy steppes and shrubland, highest
highs and lowest lows. They shoulder the burgeoning
recovery among wolves and ravens. Span the Samosely
selfsettlers, the sturdy evacuation refusers.
The world’s worst nuclear disaster has given way to this:
glints of sunlight in the reactor shadows, brown voles
Fall 2018
As soon as I get them
I give them away
This one is a fork in the road
This one breathes underwater
This one rubs my blood between his fingers
Forest of hands
This one is salt scraped from the seafloor
This one is yolk on my chin
This one broke my only ladder...
Fall 2018
I taste of pajamas
I wear them all day
and pocket my dreams
in pinstripes for later
I smooth the brambled sheets
arrange the lover
fluff the shallows
when my laughter awakes
I comb it twice and send it off to school...
Fall 2018
You are Mary and I am Laura
and Jack is our pet tornado
churning across the berm.
He twists up grass
and a murmuration of starlings.
He twists up a swarm of locusts.
We loop dirty fingers
and walk to the tracks...
Winter 2020
I teach her how to place the contact lens carefully / on the tip of her finger. To examine the flare of its / lip, make sure it curves in, not out. The lens is / lightly tinted blue for visibility. To make it easier / to see the small thing... read the rest at Rust + Moth
February 2019
You rip up the old beige carpet, matted down with fifty years of footsteps. Dust whirls up: bantam bits of grandparents and babies and pets and dinosaurs and rocks from space. The history of the universe and yesterday’s Chihuahua dandruff are equal here, spinning gold in the light from the window.... read the rest at TIMBER
October 2018
The morning smells like freshly-baked bread / and low-tide sea creatures. Someone whistles / for their dog. Someone asks for their coffee to go. / Someone picks out a Sam Cooke song on the guitar. / We listen to tourists’ footsteps on the boardwalk above / and cup our terrible song in fingers stained with seaweed / and nicotine... read the rest at Sweet Tree Review
October 2018
You are Mary and I am Laura / and Jack is our pet tornado / churning across the berm. / He twists up grass and a / murmuration of starlings. / He twists up a swarm of locusts.... read the rest at Menacing Hedge
July 2018
88% is a lot, nearly the whole / thing. The black moon sliding / over the sun like a manhole / cover, a heavy mineral disc left / ajar. But shadow-chasers say / totality makes all the difference....read the rest at Pittsburgh Poetry Review
DIDO BAKES A PIE
Today, I gathered
the strawberries that
grew wild after you
left. Snipped the runners
running from their beds,
flicked baby slugs from
the underbellies
of serrated leaves,
deposed red berries
from their sprouted crowns....
DEMETER SCRUBS THE BATHTUB
When winter gives way to wet,
our breath more water than air,
you think of flowers:
snowdrops and cherry blossoms,
lilacs pearled in purple-beaded bundles,
erroneous crocuses....
He’s the original Adam, cable-knit sweater pulled down
over his missing rib. He’s thinking about ending things
with Eve—not because he doesn’t love her, I mean God,
look at their history—but because he can’t remember...
HERA TAKES DOWN THE CHRISTMAS TREE
I begin with the smallest ornaments, start at the top
and work my way down, lift the fine filament hooks
from every browning branch. The tree’s fragrance rises
at each violation, its pine scent strong and tangible.
It stretches like an animal above my head....
SLAP/STICK
The little girls watch Peter Pan in the living room, bare
toes curled against the arm of the overstuffed
chair they share under a zebra-striped blanket.
An animated Captain Hook shoots
one of his mates in the middle of a song.
Smee genuflects in his chubby humble way....
SHOAL
It starts with the hemistich hitch in her step.
A henchwoman’s tell, regret stopping up the gait
with sediment. This moon’s stepdaughter can’t keep
swindling tarot cards and sneaking roofies
into her own whiskey-gingers...
THE VALKYRIES CLEAR THE TABLE
The heroes have autographed the table again
with their glasses, rings of condensation
in looped cursive circles that interrupt
each other’s epics. We take turns
riding to the shoreline
to measure the water’s rise....
If it weren’t for the air frothed thick with lilacs
it would feel like August. The lawn under my bare feet
still warm from the sun, even beneath the moon’s round face.
It’s nearly one a.m., late for this morning girl,
but I couldn’t sleep with the laundry out and rain coming....
The hollows of what would have been
my children pock the mud in mucky swallows—
not even the clamor of shattered shell
or broken bones, just the gulping absences
sunk among reeds and sweet-grass....
